Mon, Nov 20, 2017 10:22 pm

Someone sent me a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation to review. The file
I received was a .pptx file which I opened using the PowerPoint application
in Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac on my
MacBook Pro
laptop running
OS X El Capitan (10.11.6). When I viewed the presentation, I noticed one
of the slides was blank. I sometimes receive Microsoft Excel workbooks which
contain a worksheet that should normally contain network diagrams where the
diagrams don't appear when viewed on my Mac laptop, but do appear when I open
the file in Microsoft Excel on a system running the Microsoft Windows operating
system. In such cases, I've found that since the .xlsx or .xlsm
file
format is just an XML-based container format akin to a
zip file, I
rename the files where the problem occurs to have a .zip rather
than .xlsx or .xlsm extension, which then allows me to extract the
files contained within the file - see
Zipping and unzipping Excel
xlsx files and Extracting
embedded documents from an Excel .xlsm file. Then I use the OS X
file command
in a
Terminal window to examine the .bin files in the xl/embeddings
subdirectory that is produced when I extract the files and folders
from the zip file. That utility tells me which of the .bin files
represent embedded Microsoft Visio or PowerPoint files, so I can then give
the Visio ones a .vsd extension rather than a .bin extension. I can
then view the diagrams with the free
VSD Viewer Pro application
I have on the Mac. Since there are usually several .bin files in the directory,
I created a Python script
to determine the file type for all of the files in a directory at once.